Animated Oprah Interviews Bernanke

Earlier this month: Oprah Winfrey: grabbed headlines with her blockbuster interview with serial doper and international pariah Lance Armstrong. Now, an animated Oprah keeps the momentum going with a harrowing interview with Federal Reserve Chairman: Ben Bernanke, another: major figure who is equally dependent on artificial stimulus to juice his job performance.

In this mock animated interview produced by the Peter Schiff Show, the daily radio broadcast by noted author and economist Peter Schiff, Oprah gets Bernanke to confess to repeated attempts to push up economic statistics through direct and repeated injections of powerful monetary stimulants. His motivation: a competitive central banking culture fixated on short-term performance and his desire to curry favor with the political and media elite. 12 minutes of hilarity ensue.

Although the cartoon was produced for laughs, the underlying message is deadly serious. Why is artificial performance enhancement considered dangerous and unacceptable in sports, but necessary and proper in economics? Schiff uses the obvious parallels between Lance Armstrong’s quest to achieve cycling dominance and Bernanke’s cycling of Quantitative Easing programs to point out what should be obvious: our current economic performance is based on a lie that will end badly.